A friend managed to pull some strings and helped him stay in Tokyo for the next year and a half before he was sent home. He was stationed in Tokyo and preparing to be deployed to fight in the Korean War when he learned he had a chance to become an interpreter.īut he failed the Japanese language interpreter test. Kids were giving me dirty looks but how could I stand there and put my hand over my heart for the country that really me up?”Īfter graduating high school, Umemoto enlisted in the U.S. “I just stood there with my hands by my side. “We were saying the Pledge of Allegiance and I couldn’t,” Umemoto said. wartime propaganda depicting the Japanese as cartoonish figures with slanted eyes and speaking broken English.īy his first day at Roosevelt High School, he could already feel he was different. They went to live in a 9-foot by 12-foot room in a hotel owned by a family friend on the edge of Los Angeles' Skid Row. Courtesy Hank UmemotoĪfter the war, Umemoto carried that same sense of shame. Umemoto spent three years incarcerated with his family at the camp, which was one of 10 camps that held more than 110,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. There were some times when I wished I wasn’t Japanese.” Hank Umemoto at Manzanar. “It made us feel inferior, like we weren’t patriotic. “It’s what the camp represented that was harmful,” Umemoto said.

Although it has been 70 years since the end of World War II, the camps still leave their mark on the survivors of incarceration, who say it’s as vital as ever to learn from the past and essential that people across the country are educated about this chapter of American history.

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